it’s sunday. in total this weekend i have spent 14 hours (and about to spend a few more) as a slave to my school system. and make no mistake: this is no labor of love. i’ve probably said it before but i find teachers so… insulting at times. there’s this saying that goes something like this: elementary school teachers are there for the kids, middle school teachers are there half for their subject, half for the kids, and the high school teachers are there for the subject. it’s mothers day weekend, and i had 14-18 hours of work. honestly that’s just rude. it’s insulting, degrading, disrespectful, insensitive, and selfish (can you tell i’m not pleased about this). when you go to one of the best public schools in the state, you expect it to be difficult, and prestigious, but there is a limit. it’s like my teachers flipping me the bird. i’m obviously frustrated, but i totally have good reason for it right?
anyways i was able to get out for about an hour or two to wellsley center, which is a nearby town with a kind of neat town center. see my town doesn’t have a town center (though they’re trying to build one), and has absolutely nothing, so we have to outsource the mothers day shopping experience to other local towns. pathetic isn’t it? anyways so i got out for a little while. i got to go to this really awesome new supermarket, it’s freakin’ huge! i (not so) secretly love supermarkets, it’s my favorite kind of store.
i’m making progress on my goal, which i’ve only really told one person about. maybe i’ll write about it if i reach it. i really hope i do, it’d make me feel so much better. i think i mentioned it earlier. anyways i’m making some progress.
i think that’s all i’ve got to say for now. i’m looking forward to the end of school, i’m going to be working hard this week finishing up the last of my major assignments before i start preparing for finals. i really want to go on a picnic soon. my current mood can be described by no such thing by john mayer. i’m too lazy to host it myself, so i’m mooching from someone. sorry?
peace ~ dave
so today i decided that i’d be content eating pomegranates for the rest of my life, and nothing but. i hadn’t had a pomegranate in a while, and i came home and had one today. its just such a vibrant thing: i love it (don’t worry i’ll eat other stuff, i just need to start eating pomegranates more often).
i’ve found two fantastic blogs today that i just feel compelled to share. both different, yet both very appealing reads. one thing that i see similar between them is that both authors just have this indescribable feel to their writing. it just feels so human, i wish i could write at the level they do.
one thing that i’ve always looked for is a really interesting blog written by guy my age, unfortunately i haven’t found one. i feel like there are a lot of girls in high school writing blogs, but not many boys. it’s probably something with the whole macho complex stage i seemed to skip. it’s also pretty frustrating that whenever i search for gay on the wordpress blog search i end up with cheep amateur porn :-\.
so one thing i realized today is that i’ve been in the same school district for ten. TEN years! my class actually isn’t that big, roughly about 240 students. there are still people that i’m fascinated by, that i’ve never met, but really want to. plus other people in other grades. i think i need to stop limiting myself by the rules others have set out (the invisible web of lies and rumors that separates us all from one another). there are a bunch of people i would really love to get to know.
there’s this one girl i was friendly with as a tot in elementary school, but lost touch with. now some people don’t like her, but i find her fascinating. she’s so nice, i’m so glad i’ve started to get to know her a bit more this year. she’s not at all who i thought she was, or expected her to be. i love when that happens, when you realize that you’ve assigned certain things to someone, and they prove you wrong. i think we all do it sometimes, where we dismiss a person. i’m really trying to change how i approach meeting people, i think it makes all the difference going into something with an open mind.
anyways lets talk about what’s in my dock!
the software that lives in my dock (i’ll post later a list of other installed programs)
finder - the finder in leopard is amazing, fast, cute effective ’nuff said.
dashboard - it launches me into widget world!
safari - the savanna navigator that seems to never keep me on track, that i love anyways
firefox 3 beta 5 - my standards complient browser friend, i can’t wait until firefox 3 is released!
mail - i always said that i would never use a desktop mail client: i evidently lied. i use the to-do a lot too.
adium - with my custom yoda icon and design (i made part of the theme) adium keeps me connected in my style
joost - alas an old friend. i watched many a episodes of jericho on joost.
handbrake - sans ugly pineapple icon handbrake helps me copy dvd’s into movie files for iPod or MacBook
songbird - an interesting concept: itunes like music management built on firefox code, works like a browser, intergrates well with everything, and pretty. i’ll switch when itunes annoys me too much…
itunes - a bloated, un-featured whore.
veoh player - plays/downloads videos from veoh for me. also pretty.
vlc - god of media players, plays anything. i mean anything.
pixelmator - a fantastic image editor
photobooth - good times with my mac
burn - a free cd burning program, data and music (for when i’m not on speaking terms with itunes).
audacity - a free cross-platform audio editor that i adore.
imovie oh eight - love/hate relationship
pages - best full featured word processor ever. kicks word butt!
textedit - my text scratch pad for everything, notes copy paste etc
bean - a text editor that goes full screen. i write my blog here now, and copy into the box in wp
it’s only wednesday and i must make it to friday. i hope to be back soon! a special shout out to cindy, who is a wonderful friend flying 1,845 miles this summer to visit old friends. cindy, i love you, and you can’t get here fast enough!
today i gave satan an ultimatum. comcast has a mere 10 days left as my isp/tv provider. the friendly neighborhood Verizon FiOS salesman came to our door today, and we were planning on switching to FiOS soon anyways, so we signed up today. i’ve been through hell (and just never left) with comcast, so come may 16th the friendly FiOS people come back to my house to install. see here’s the no brainer about FiOS (not to insert an advert or anything). FiOS is faster / more reliable then comcast. FiOS TV gives you nearly one hundred more channels, and 20 more high definition channels (40 total, 100 total by the end of 2008). not to mention the OnDemand feature with FiOS gives you about 9,700 more movies to choose from, and all of the content you can find on comcast. here’s the kicker: it’s cheaper then comcast. that’s right FiOS cost less then comcast. even if we were to go crazy and buy the 20/2 package for an extra $5 a month, we’d still be less then comcast who charges $20 more for 3/1.5. anyways now that i’ve ranted about it, i just hope it lives up to all of my expectations. i can’t wait though!
so in my little quaint town, the high school seniors have this tradition called hill night. they camp out overnight on this hill near the high school, get disgustingly wasted, and then run down the hill through campus causing a commotion. this thing has been around for twenty or more years now. our new principal this year has decided to ban it, threatening to deny diploma’s to any senior who attempts to run down the hill. there’s going to be police posted on the school grounds, the whole shabang. now i obviously don’t fully understand hill night being a freshman, but you know no one’s died yet. sure people get hurt when they drink themselves silly and try to run down a hill, but that’s kind of a given. anyways the hysterical part of all of this is that many of those police officers who are going to be stopping kids from running down the hill, ran down the hill themselves when they attended wayland high school. that’s right, many of the police officers in town attended wayland. i know it’s their job, but is that hypocritical or what? i mean obviously our principal can’t condone hill night because underage drinking/ drugs are illegal, but can’t he take a hint from the last principal who just let it slide? he’s turned it into this big deal now, so naturally someone’s going to get hurt badly because of it. i just hope everything turns out okay. it would really suck if someone got hurt, or if people can’t graduate.
i personally should be doing work right now, as i have a lot of it, but lately i’ve been finding this blog a better and better distraction. it’s so much easier to write here then go write the english / french / history paper i’m ‘sposed to be writing. anyways i think i want some tea. hope all is well with all of you.
so i’ve just read over some of my previous entries, i can’t believe people are actually reading this…. all i’m writing about is school. i’m the first one to admit that it’s not that interesting. anyways my goal is to write about somewhat broader topics.
today one of my teachers actually said “half the stuff you learn in high school you will never need again in your lifetime.” if only i had gotten it in writing. we were working with imaginary numbers in math recently. so when it came time for the test i raised my hand and asked “if we’re working with imaginary numbers, can we have an imaginary test, with an imaginary grade” (i’m a wiseass, i know). i think might have lost points for it (me losing points on the test has nothing to do with the fact that i’m terrible at math).
if i’m never going to use half this stuff in real life, please remind me why i go to my classes? i guess it’s a good idea to have a basic understanding of a variety of topics, but honestly is it truly necessary for me to have a thorough understanding of the insides of a squid (i dissected one in biology today)? i love my biology class, and i find (some of) it interesting, but there are other areas i’d rather focus on.
so something’s been bothering me lately. i’m a member of a lot of different sites on the web. facebook, bebo, yahoo, flickr, picasaweb, Vazzar, WeeklyShot, and just about any free webhost you can think of: i probably have an account there. plus not to mention a few student sites and gay forums. anyways a lot of people seem to think they know me because they’ve read my profile. someone actually messaged me on facebook the other day saying i was kind of whiny on this blog sometimes. no kidding? you mean i’m actually a human being, who can feel a variety of emotions? most of the time i’m a pretty happy person, and often i chose to “whine” on here rather then subject someone to it. honestly this is just silly. first off this blog is here for me. i share the link by choice, for anyone who might want to connect with me. i read a bunch of other blogs, and people want to read about you, when you read about them. it’s a great way to meet people.
i certainly share a lot of personal information here, i’m not going to deny that reading this is going to help you understand me better. there’s a difference between understanding someone, and knowing them. anyways if you want to get to know me, you’re going to have to talk to me.
i don’t allow comments on my blog because people always want you to “sub4sub”. it’s like on youtube, it drives me crazy. people “subscribe” to your blog, and ask you to do the same. i want to subscribe to someone i find interesting. not to be mean, but i don’t want my blog to become some portal for someone who wants subscriptions. there’s plenty of others who are willing to do that. i still see the comments you write though, i just never publish them thanks all of you kind enough to write in.
right now i’m at that point where you’re on the tail end of a crush, but you can’t just be done with it. i’ve liked this one guy for a long time, of course he is (i hope) clueless to this fact. then again he doesn’t really know me that well, so i doubt i’m a second thought to him. normally i get really sad at this point, when i start to figure out they’re straight, but for some reason i’m not that sad. i really like him, it’s just never going to happen.
for a while i’ve been bumming out (okay… really frustrated) that i don’t have many “options” in this quaint little town. it really makes you feel incredibly isolated when you realize just how few people are like you. plus i’m not exactly the spitting image stereotype (though quite frankly i should probably stop walking into school looking so scruffy), so finding someone has been that much more difficult. it used to eat at me, and yeah while it’s frustrating, i’m starting to realize that it’s not the end of the world. the next three years are probably going to be a little rough in that sense, but i’m going to try not to let it phase me. i’m pretty lucky that so many people have been so great about this. i think that’s enough for now.
there’s this great song by a woman named meghan tonjes that’s been stuck in a head for obvious reasons for a while now.
so i’ve been looking for a good full screen text editor now for ages. i nearly bought one, but i found a really good free one called bean (for mac). it’s very basic, but it does the trick. i just don’t like writing with all these other distracting windows, and writing freehand is not my forte.
i had a eureka moment today, though it was kind of a captain obvious thing. i was sitting at my kitchen table eating pb and j on an toasted english muffin (reading time magazine of all things) and i had an epiphany. my first thought was “what kind of freak has an epiphany reading time magazine?” and of course i realized i was that kind of freak. i’ve known for a while that i need an attitude adjustment, or more just an adjustment in general. the catch is that i have to put in the effort. this might seem pretty obvious; you want to do something, you have to do it. i’ve been making excuses pushing it off. i mean first it was “over february break i’m going to change.” then it was “oh i’ll just wait until summer to change.” that’s not good enough. there’s always going to be an excuse why not to do it. i’m busy. i have finals. i have summer. i mean to get something done right you have to do it yourself. what have i been thinking? that someone’s going to come along and do it for me? they say that half of it is the *will* to do it. i say that half of it is doing it, and the other half is *continuing* it.
so now that i’m ready to change myself i hit a road block. where do i start? do i start on the outside, or the inside? honestly i have no idea what i’m trying to accomplish. is it totally crazy to think i was a better person last year? i mean middle school we’re all naive. we think we understand the entire world, that we can look up the definition. we’re used to the comfort of teachers chasing us down keeping us in check. we’re used to the safe little environment we call school. i think it’s wrong that i was able to take more social action in middle school then high school. what i think is worse is that high school squashed a lot of it out of me. last year i was so idealistic. i had morals, goals, and heck lets go full out cheesy i had dreams. but in all seriousness i was a much better person. this year i’m a much more open person, that’s for sure. i mean i came out this year, how much more open do you want to get?
i’ve lost something though. i’ve had some major challenges this year, that have nothing to do with high school. anyways i need to do some serious soul searching, sooner rather then later. is it way to cliche to say that i feel “lost in the abyss”? probably. maybe i am cliche though, maybe thats part of what this is all about. cliche’s have been said so many times that they become… cliche. sure they’re no good in fiction, but this is truth. this is 100% non-ficticious reality, and maybe we all are cliche. being cliche is part of being human. time for a cupa tea.
i write here sometimes. i'm a student. i live atop the last remaining truffula tree. i have a major distaste for starbucks. i live in *insert.small.town.here* america. i have a normal accent. a normal name, in a normal town. i attend a normal high school. i am.... (i'll give you one guess)
dave